South Carolina fails to pick official state flag again this year. Here’s what happened
South Carolina will have to make do without an official flag for at least another year after state lawmakers failed to pick one this legislative session.
A bill for a proposed official state flag remained stuck on the Senate calendar this session and never even made it to a vote. The bill faced its main opposition from Sen. Brad Hutto, D-Orangeburg, who also stood against setting an official flag last year.
“We have a state flag, it’s been that way for 250 years … we’ve got one of the most recognizable flags in the nation,” Hutto said on Friday.
Attempts to reach Sen. Ronnie Cromer, R-Newberry, the bill’s sponsor, were unsuccessful Friday.
To Hutto, though there are a few variants of the state’s flag in circulation, they are all easily recognizable and the whole quest to create an official version is a non-issue created, he suspects, for possibly monetary gain.
“We haven’t had an issue for 250 years and now in the last few years someone thinks we ought to have this one flag to make,” Hutto said. “Someone is trying to capitalize off this.”
South Carolina has not had a standardized flag design since 1940, when the Legislature repealed that portion of the code of laws. The laws were repealed because they required that Clemson University produce state flags at cost, which the university no longer wanted to do.
Ever since, designing the flag has fallen largely to manufacturers, each of which produce a slightly different design. For example, the flag flying atop the State House dome is not the same from those displayed inside the building.
Lawmakers started trying to standardize the flag in 2018, tasking a group of historians with designing something that gives a hat tip to the state’s historical flags. In March 2020, that group delivered a design to lawmakers. Once it became public, it was widely ridiculed. After that, other proposed designs were submitted.
The current proposed design uses the original indigo blue, pantone 282C and the original shape and proportions of the crescent used in the second state flag. The crescent is still shown at an angle, opening to the top left corner of the flag.
The proposed flag change also employs the trunk design and grass element from a sketch drawn by Ellen Heyward Jervey that was used in the official flag design from 1910. The palm fronds are perky, full and more symmetrical.
This story was originally published May 13, 2022 at 12:24 PM.
